


Criticism and Self-Criticism

by lepidopteran



Series: Mutually Assured Destruction [2]
Category: The Young Ones (TV 1982)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Codependency, Cuddling, Hankie Code as Plot Device, Jealousy, M/M, Mutual Pining, Needles, Period Typical Attitudes, Possessive Behavior, Self-Mutilation, Talking Animals, Trans Character, Trans Vyvyan, in spite of the tags this is very lighthearted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 21:24:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11952927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lepidopteran/pseuds/lepidopteran
Summary: Vyvyan is perfectly happy to shove the secrets of his body right up against anyone who offers him the slightest provocation to violence.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> “Starting from the desire for unity, resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle, and arriving at a new unity on a new basis. In our experience this is the correct method of resolving contradictions among the people.”  
> \- Mao Tse-tsung, 1952.

Rick falls into a series of foolish assumptions after meeting Vyvyan. The first, of course, is the knee-jerk assumption of the state of his genitals based solely on the appearance of his clothed body. For such flagrant physicalism he should by rights be drawn and quartered, and the remaining pieces of him nailed to the cross of Cartesian dualism, displayed in the Sociology building as a warning to all undergraduates. 

He doesn’t learn that this first assumption was wrong until several months into their new adventure as flatmates. And from there, like a line of embarrassing dominoes, each assumption seems to topple him into another.   
  
An uneven bass line thrums around him, packed like one among many sardines into a punk club even more smelly than himself. He squeezes past another denim-clad medical student and over to Vyvyan, who has his eyes fixed firmly on the band, jaw locked into a snarl, staring daggers as if he can push them off stage by will alone. Rick knows from experience that if Vyvyan could shove his way to the front, he _would_ hoist up onto the plywood platform and physically push the band out of his way, unplug their amps, smash whatever instruments are carelessly left in his path.

“Vyvyan,” Rick hisses directly into his ear, trying to assert his weak, shrill voice over the chaotic, arrhythmic drums.

“What now?” Vyvyan snaps, somehow without moving any part of his body, even his mouth. “I’m trying to _focus_.”

“Focus on hating them, you mean?” Rick tries to maneuver himself into Vyvyan’s field of vision. “What’s your problem this time?”

“Got too much rhythm,” Vyvyan says. “Punk? Give me a break. It’s more like arena rock.”

Rick huffs, and waves a hand in front of Vyvyan’s face. Vyv finally turns at that, snapping his hand up and twisting Rick’s wrist _just_ enough not to break it. Rick gasps, shakes it out, and crows, “Missed!”

“I was _trying_ to miss,” Vyvyan says. He grabs Rick by a handful of blazer and heaves him up, setting him down half an inch away -- as far away from Vyvyan as possible, under the circumstances. “Don’t want to break you. You’ll be no fun if you’re in hospital.”

“Oh, please,” Rick says. “You’d just rip out my IV and throw me over your shoulder, you neanderthal.”

Vyvyan grins and sticks an elbow in Rick’s ribs. “Did you want something, or did you just come over here for a chat?”

Rick adjusts his lapels. “Come to the lavatory with me?”

“Oh,” Vyvyan says, and seems to consider for a moment, before he says, “Pouf.” He turns back to the band, as if that’s enough to dismiss Rick.

“Whatever _obscene_ thoughts you’re thinking about me, Vyvyan, you’d best forget them this instant.” He raises his weak chin, tries to jut it out at least a little. The result is a squirrel looking for the best route up a tree.  “You know very well what I do in the privacy of my own bedroom, and you can bet I won’t do any of it with _you_.”

“All you do in your bedroom is write soppy poems,” Vyvyan says. “Virgin.”

“I am _not_ \--” Rick says, and then takes a deep, squeaky breath through his nose. There’s not enough space here to give Vyvyan the thrashing he deserves, so it’s best not to start. “I just don’t like going to the lavatory alone, that’s all. You pervert,” he adds, to preserve a modicum of pride.

“Girl,” Vyvyan says absently, once again wholeheartedly immersed in hating the band.

Rick stamps his foot, and feels hot tears bubble in his eyes, and wipes at them with the heel of his hand. “I can’t _stand_ being alone. If you make me go alone, Vyvyan, maybe I’ll _never_ come back.” 

He hates crying in front of Vyvyan, because it provokes some sort of horrible twisted caretaking instinct in the man, and Rick is much more comfortable being beat bloody than comforted. Even if Vyv’s idea of comfort is to shove him down and sit on his chest, eating crisps, til he stops weeping. But crying is a fantastic way to get what he wants.

“Oh, god, you nancy,” Vyvyan says. “That’s disgusting. Here,” He tugs the mustard-coloured bandana out of his left pocket and hands it over. _Mustard in left pocket -- hung, eight inches plus._ Rick glances down at Vyv’s crotch before loudly blowing his nose into the already snot-encrusted rag. He’s never sure if Vyvyan knows the hankie code, and if so, he must be intentionally mocking it.

When Rick hands the hankie back, Vyvyan says, “I’ll stand in line with you. But I’m not coming in.”

Vyvyan muscles and “Oi!”s his way sidelong through the crowd, Rick clutching onto the hem of his vest to follow in the narrow path he clears.  
  
When they’re leaning against the wall in the long line to the lavatory, Rick starts up whinging again. “ _Why_ won’t you go in with me? You’re already here.”

“Why won’t you go in alone?” Vyvyan retorts.

“The philistines always call me a faggot,” Rick says. “I can’t help it if their willies are _right there_ , directly in my line of sight.” He sniffs.

“You _are_ a faggot,” Vyvyan points out, without venom.

“Well yes,” Rick waves a hand, “but that’s not the _point_. It’s a matter of principle, I’m sure _you_ wouldn’t understand. And what if they push me around? You know I’m _delicate_. Like all those romantic poets with wasting sickness,” he adds, to specify that he’s not in any way like a girl.

“Fuck off,” says Vyvyan, pointing to a fading bruise on his jaw. “No you’re not.” But Rick knows he’s somewhat swayed. Vyvyan hates the idea of anyone other than him laying a hand on Rick. He likes Rick intact so he can tear him to pieces more thoroughly.

“Anyway, I asked first,” Rick huffs. “ _Why_ won’t you go in with me?”

“Think about it, numbskull,” Vyvyan says. “Have you _ever_ seen me go into a men’s lavvy?”

“Well, no,” Rick admits. “But I thought you just didn’t need to piss, like a bird or a lizard. You’ve got a cloaca, or whatever. Or maybe you just recycle it back into your body. That’s why you’re so acidic.” He pauses. “Is urine acidic?”

“Depends on your typical diet, and other factors. If you’re a vegetarian --” he spits out the word “-- it’ll be more alkaline, see. But if you get enough protein, like me, then yeah, it’s acidic.” He scratches at his chin, and then shoves Rick’s shoulder. “Doesn’t change the fact that you’re bloody stupid.”

“Are you just shy?” Rick teases. “Scared I’ll look at _your_ willy?”

“You’ll never see my willy. So sorry,” Vyvyan says nastily.

“Well, excuse _me_ , Mr. Macho,” Rick says. “You don’t have to assert your heterosexual hypermasculinity over every little thing --”

“I’ve got no willy, idiot,” Vyvyan says. He grabs Rick’s hand and places it on his crotch. “I’ve a _fanny_ ,” he says, drawing a few glances from the skins in line ahead of them, who hurriedly look away when their eyes fall on 178 rock-solid centimeters of lunatic metalhead.

Well, that clinches it. He definitely has no clue about the hankie code, or else it’s all a big, probably homophobic, joke. Rick tentatively squeezes. It’s rather a different texture than he always imagined. “It’s a sock,” Vyvyan says proudly, thrusting into Rick’s hand.

Rick quickly pulls away. “God, you’re disgusting.” He just manages to dodge the inevitable punch, and holds up his hands when Vyvyan winds up for another. “I meant the _sock_ , not your -- your _whatnot_.” He gestures at Vyvyan’s jeans. “I don’t _mind_ , obviously, I mean, I really couldn’t care _less_ what sort of bits you’ve got --”

“Shut up,” says Vyvyan. “I’m leaving.”

“What?” Rick says, and tries desperately to grab at Vyvyan’s sleeve before he can go. “Why?”

“Because you’re very boring, and nobody likes you,” Vyvyan says cheerily, thrusting up two fingers. After a few heavy-booted steps away, he turns back just a little, and says, “Don’t take too long looking at other blokes’ cocks, now. I won’t wait up forever.”

When his bladder is empty, Rick finds Vyvyan perched on a dumpster behind the venue. There’s a cigarette clenched between his teeth, and several more stubbed out around his feet. “Took you long enough,” he says.

“Oh, for Cliff’s sake, Vyvyan,” Rick huffs. “It’s not like I _forced_ you to wait for me.”

Vyvyan disdains to respond, instead extending a hand down. Rick ignores it in favor of tugging himself up, but his hips catch on the end of the lid. After a moment of wiggling his bottom in a futile but noble effort, Vyvyan drags him up by his armpits. Rick dusts off his blazer and doesn’t thank him.

“I didn’t _know_ , obviously,” Rick says. “And I really don’t care.” He sniffs. “The sock bit is _really_ foul, though. I’ve smelled your socks and they’re positively _rank_.”

“When have you smelled my socks, you pouf?” Vyvyan sucks on his cigarette and exhales through his nose. “Only poufs sniff other bloke’s socks.”

“I can smell them _now._ ”

Vyvyan shrugs. “Yours aren’t any better.”

“Yes, well, fair enough, but I don’t shove them down my _pants_ , now do I, Vyvyan?” Rick waves a hand in front of his face to disperse both the clouds of tobacco smoke, and the combined smell of both their socks. “Isn’t that terribly unsanitary?”

“That’s why I cultivate my crotch fungi and foot fungi for maximum compatibility,” says Vyvyan. He offers the fag to Rick. It’s the most polite gesture Vyvyan has ever made, so Rick takes it warily. What is this? Is Vyv hitting on him?

Vyvyan says, “You’re not my type, wanker.” Rick has known him long enough that he’s come to the conclusion that Vyvyan can, most probably, almost definitely, read minds. He scowls.

“Nor are you mine,” he says, and coughs before the cigarette even makes it to his lips, and hands it back right away.

Vyvyan hops down, and offers Rick a sweaty, muscular arm, which he consents to lean on heavily as he scrambles to the ground. “Come on,” says Vyvyan. “It’s gonna rain, and you’ll scream like a girlie if your nancy clothes get wet.”

Rick huffs. One would think Vyv _might_ be less of a misogynist pig, under the circumstances. He neglects to let go of Vyvyan’s arm for the whole walk home, and for once, Vyvyan doesn’t try to shake him off. 


	2. Chapter 2

The second assumption is that Vyvyan’s macho act is a reaction against his feminine upbringing, an attempt to push away the gender he rejected by over-performing his own. The hypothesis certainly has a clever ring to it. He briefly considers asking for an interview and writing a paper on it, but realizes this would result in Vyvyan folding him over his knee and belting him within an inch of his life. His bottom is still sore from the last time, when he cast aspersions on SPG’s parentage.

He does finally snap and present the thesis to Vyvyan, in the middle of their latest row, while Vyvyan has him smushed up against the door to his room and is repeatedly slamming his forehead into Rick’s.

In between smacks, Rick gets his point across word by word. “You’re only --” _slam_ “-- doing this --” _slam_ “-- to --” _slam_ “-- prove --” _SLAM,_ and when Vyvyan pauses to wipe blood off his stars, he finishes all in a rush, “to prove you’re not a girl!”

Vyvyan looks up from licking Rick’s blood off his palm to bash his head against Rick one last time, this time hitting his nose, which gushes red all down the high-buttoned collar of Rick’s favorite (and only) shirt.

“You bastard!” Rick shrills. “I’ll have to _wash_ this!”

“Pansy,” Vyvyan says. “You’ve been reading too much Andrea Dworkin. Or Mary-Bloody-Daly. Or whatever bumbags they assign in your nancy-boy department.”

“Well then, _Vyvyan_ ,” Rick sneers. “What’s the _medical_ opinion on your _transsexuality_?” He draws the word out, because he’s certain Vyvyan will hate it. But Vyvyan doesn’t seem to mind. Or he doesn’t show it.

He scratches his jaw, and says brightly, “My medical opinion is: piss off!”

He hoists Rick up by his blood-soaked collar, flings the door open, and throws him into the hall. The carpet burns his bottom when he falls. After a moment, the door opens a crack. A box of gauze squares and a roll of medical tape fly directly into Rick’s face. Then the door slams again.

Rick shuffles over on his knees and shakes the doorknob, but it’s locked tight. He peers through the keyhole and hisses, “Vyv? Let me in! You know we don’t lock doors in this house, you _fascist._ Vyvyan?”

He presses his ear to the keyhole. It’s too quiet. Rick would expect to hear smashing and shouting by this time. He huffs and stomps down the hall to his own room, only to find several dozen gallons of chunky brown paste fermenting noxiously in a trash bin balanced on his bed frame. His mattress has been shoved halfway out the window.

He marches downstairs and flings open the front door. Neil is on his knees weeding his hideous flower bed, where he lovingly cultivates parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. “Neil!” Rick screams. “Why, _pray_ tell, is there a barrel of salty poo on my bed?”

“Whoa, heavy,” Neil moans. “It’s only miso paste. Sorry, Rick. Only I thought you wouldn’t mind, ‘cause you’re always with Vyvyan, and all.”

Rick stamps his foot and gropes around for a retort. He does sleep in Vyvyan’s bed most nights, but only because Vyvyan burned _both_ his teddies and sleeping without something to cuddle gives Rick nightmares, even if that something is a nightmare himself. But it’s important that he still has a room to go back to, as a safeguard against just such situations as this.

“If we lived one hundred years ago, Neil, you’d be the village idiot,” Rick snaps.

“Sorry, Rick,” Neil says. “Only I think you might be thinking of the medieval times, which were a little more than a hundred years ago, Rick. Just a few more years, though.”

Rick slams a plastic flowerpot down over Neil’s head. “Shut up. I’m sure I know rather more about history than you.”

“Sure,” Neil says, somewhat muffled. “Only I study history, is all.”

“Not anymore,” Rick says. “Remember? You dropped out last month to get in a dirty hippie bus and follow one of your hippie bands on tour. But you were stoned out of your mind and you missed the stupid bus.” 

“Oh yeah,” Neil says, furrowing his brow. “I’m a self-directed learner now, see. Unofficially.”

“Whatever,” Rick says. “Can you at _least_ move your poo off my bed?”

Neil winces. “‘Fraid not, see, it can’t be moved for three more months or it won’t ferment right. Sorry. You can kip with me, though, if you like.” Mike’s room, of course, is not an option. So Rick is forced to say yes.

It’s clear after one night that this solution just won’t do. Neil spends all night leaning out his window staring at the moon, in some kind of demented monastic practice of perfect silence and stillness. It gives Rick the creeps. And that garish astrological calendar gives him headaches.

After two nights on the sofa, he spends one night with the sofa converted into the coffin. This proves to be no more comfortable, and somehow provokes Rick to lie with his arms crossed on his chest and contemplate his own death all night.   
  
He’s starting to feel lonely without anyone around to slam his face into every available surface. The next night, he decides that enough is enough. He sets up camp outside Vyvyan’s door with a blanket and the taxidermy weasel he’s been using as a teddy, because Vyvyan _must_ leave for the lavatory at some point. Hopefully.

He’s just drifting off when Vyvyan shouts, “Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off. The door’s unlocked.”

Rick jolts upright, and shoves at the door tentatively. It swings open. Vyvyan says, “I unlocked it after twenty minutes, idiot. Thought you might like to come in and have a sleep, at some point.”

“I thought you were hiding from me,” Rick says, feeling rather stupid.

“Not bloody likely,” Vyvyan croaks. “I came downstairs plenty of times. You were too busy watching nature telly with Neil to notice.”

“Oh,” Rick says weakly, and slouches inside. It was a documentary about man-eating animals of the world, and it reminded him of Vyvyan.

Vyvyan, who is sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing a dress. It’s mostly leather with long ragged mesh sleeves, and studs on. It’s the sort of thing one more innocent to the ways of the world would imagine might be alluring. But instead it just looks _dangerous_. It looks like it could stop a bullet. And if Vyvyan felt moved to crowd Rick up against a wall, he knows the spikes would draw blood.

“What are you looking at?” Vyvyan demands. 

Rick sticks out his chest, and forces himself to look anywhere but at Vyvyan. “If you’re trying to prove a point about your masculinity, you needn’t bother. If _anyone_ cares in the _whole world_ , it’s certainly not me.”

“I don’t need to prove anything to you, Prick. That’s the whole point,” Vyvyan says. “I always dressed same’s I do now, even when I was a baby. I can show you pictures. Sometimes I just take a fancy to wearing a dress.” He picks around in his ear. “I’d still wear it, but it gets me into more boring fights than I’m bothered to finish.”

It’s a much longer speech than is typical of Vyvyan, whose usual communication style, where Rick is concerned, is graphic violence. Rick can’t think of anything to say, so he just perches on the mattress beside Vyvyan, primly crosses his legs, and scowls.

“Your plaster’s all crooked,” Vyvyan says, and scoots closer to prod at Rick’s nose. “You haven’t changed it for days, have you? I can’t leave you alone for a bloody minute.”

“Shut up and fix it,” Rick snaps, folding his arms. He allows Vyvyan to tear the plaster off in one go, which stings terribly. It stings even worse when Vyvyan dabs at it with a cotton puff soaked in alcohol.

“ _Ouch_ ,” Rick complains. “Where did you even find a clean cotton puff? Shouldn’t you be cleaning me up with your crotch sock, or something?”

“Hypocritical oaf,” says Vyvyan, without pausing in his task of scrubbing hard in a wide radius around Rick’s nose, as if the purpose is to remove half his face.

“You mean _hippocratic oath_ , idiot,” Rick says.

“No I don’t,” Vyvyan says. He tosses the cotton ball, soaked in vodka and blood, over to SPG, who chews it up with gusto. “It’s broken. You’ll have a bump, and look even uglier.”

“Well, you can’t complain. It’s your fault,” Rick says, and reaches up to pick at the crusty blood around his nostrils.

Vyvyan shoves his hand away. “Leave it alone. It’s your fault for talking shit.”

Rick can’t argue with that, so he sets off reciting a new poem while Vyvyan carefully tapes a clean plaster over his nose. Vyvyan finally punches him in the mouth to shut him up, and he tips backwards onto the bed, smiling with satisfaction that their equilibrium, a delicate balance of violence and codependence, is restored.

“Right. Time for bed,” Vyvyan says. He grabs the taxidermy weasel out of Rick’s clutching grip. “You won’t be needing that.”  
  
“Unhand me, invert,” the weasel squeaks, in proper Queen’s English. “My father is a constable!”  
  
“Daddy’s dead, and so are you,” Vyvyan says, and flings it across the room.

“Change your clothes,” Rick says, shoving at Vyvyan with his feet. “I can’t cuddle with those spikes.”

“Girl,” Vyvyan says, but he grabs a heap of denim from the floor, and stomps to the bathroom.

When he returns, he takes hold of Rick and drags him down in a horizontal chokehold, his boots kicking against Rick’s bare ankles. Rick falls easily into his deepest sleep all week.

 


	3. Chapter 3

His next assumption is that Vyvyan must be heterosexual. He falls into that terribly reactionary trap: the idea that the only reason anyone would live as a different gender would be to justify an attraction to the same sex. It is, of course, a homophobic belief. But can he be blamed for thinking that Vyvyan, who constantly throws around words like “faggot” and “pouf” -- mostly in Rick’s direction -- might be just a little homophobic himself?

For his part, Rick is an avowed homosexual, and not afraid who knows it. In fact, he’d very much like _everyone_ to know it. Homosexuality is the most populist option: the most embodied expression of the brotherhood of man. Apart from the pop group, anyhow. And wouldn’t it be rather misogynistic of Rick to feel even the slightest attraction to a woman, much less act on it? He doesn’t want to _objectify_ anyone.

Vyvyan, by contrast, seems inclined to hold his sexual preferences very close to the chest, if he even has any. He outright ignores any advances from both men and women. Rick briefly considers that this could be because physical contact would reveal the secrets of his body, but that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Vyvyan is perfectly happy to shove the secrets of his body right up against anyone who offers him the slightest provocation to violence.

Since Vyvyan’s initial revelation, he’s made it obvious that he has no issue with his anatomy. In fact, he loudly discusses it whenever Rick is present. He variously makes reference to his genitals by any number of impolite terms: “minge” and “clunge” and his predictable favorite, “axe wound.”

It’s still rather confusing when they go out one night and Rick notices a scrap of grey suiting flannel dangling from Vyvyan’s right pocket. _Likes men in suits_. Why would Vyvyan have a bit of suiting flannel in his pocket, if not for the hankie code? And where did he even get it -- did he tear it off the last pitiable stockbroker who made the mistake of crossing his path?

Rick glances down at his own attire. Does a blazer over jeans and red suedette booties count as a suit? If Vyvyan has some sort of pathetic crush on him, that would be terribly awkward. But would it be any better if Vyvyan has a fetish for stockbrokers?

The conundrum hangs over him like a dark cloud the whole of the night. He makes a point not to let Vyvyan out of sight, determined to gather some intelligence that might cast light on the situation. Vyvyan tries to taunt him into a row several times, and Rick staunchly resists, refusing to distract Vyvyan from the cruising he came here for.

Vyvyan seems more concerned with seeing how many blokes he can beat bloody in a single night. But after the first few fights, Rick notices a pattern. Vyvyan seems to only go for the men wearing something even remotely resembling a suit jacket. More chilling still, he’s specifically targeting those who appear to have poetic, revolutionary spirits.

He’s clutching a pudgy New Romantic in a tailed short-jacket by the ruffled cravat and slamming him repeatedly into the bar, when something already fragile in Rick snaps completely. He hears a shrill sound and realizes too late that it’s him shouting, above the heavy metal din, “Put him down, Vyvyan! Put him down this instant, you utter bastard!”

Vyvyan turns over his shoulder to stare at him, wide-eyed, and without hesitation he drops the poor sod. But Rick is so overcome with an extraordinarily uncomfortable bout of emotion that he doesn’t notice. He’s already dropped to his knees on the floor and is beating it with his fists in a full-on tantrum. A small circle of medical students forms around him, and debates the best treatment approach in hushed voices.

Vyvyan stomps over, says “Shove off, Gylyan,” to a woman with long red hair and copious black lipstick, and squats down in front of Rick. “I didn’t know you cared, ya plonker,” he says. “I’ve been trying to fight you all night and _you_ gave me the cold shoulder.” He jabs a finger at Rick’s chest.

“I _don’t_ care,” Rick says. It’s a struggle to get the words out through uncontrollable dry sobs. “What makes you think I care, _Vyvyan_? Because I don’t. At all.”

Vyvyan reaches around to grab both Rick’s pigtails in one hamfist and tug his head back. With his other hand he braces against Rick’s ribs, fingertips digging in fit to bruise. He bends and bites once, hard, into the jointure of neck and shoulder. “There. Happy now?”

“Missed my jugular.” Rick pauses to snort down a noseful of snot. “Ha-ha.”

“I’m still not trying to kill you,” Vyvyan says. “Repellent though you are.” He grabs Rick around the waist and hoists him over his shoulder, and Rick resumes pounding his fists, this time against Vyvyan’s studded back.

Vyvyan doesn’t put him down until he’s dragged him to bed, and even then, he keeps an arm firmly clenched around Rick’s chest. Rick gets ahold of Vyv’s hand and gnaws on it for a while, to no avail. Vyvyan even seems to enjoy it, the _pervert_ , smacking his lips as he settles into a snoring doze.

Rick, on the other hand, fails to sleep, though he keeps his eyes clenched very tight in case Vyvyan happens to glance over and think that he _cares_ or something. After an indeterminate and dreadfully boring period of time, Vyvyan shifts, and croaks right into his ear, “You know it didn’t mean anything, Rick.”

Rick knock his head back against Vyvyan’s collarbone, says “piss off, I told you I don’t care,” swallows an unnameable feeling, and lets himself fall asleep.


	4. Chapter 4

In this benighted incident the previous assumption topples into the last, and most fatal. This is an assumption that Rick makes about himself, for all his attempted adherence to the poetic virtue of self-knowledge. It is the assumption that he could not, in any way, ever, not even if you offered a private swimming pool and an autographed life-size painting of Cliff Richard, feel any attraction _whatsoever_ to Vyvyan Basterd.

It’s really more of a conviction than an assumption. Over the past year this conviction has become, more and more, the crux around which every day of his life revolves. His very revulsion towards Vyvyan is exactly what makes him a safe outlet for Rick’s lifelong obsessive fixation on other human beings. He desperately needs someone who will pay him absolute all-consuming attention, and Vyvyan, in his strange way, does. If his preferred form of attention is also an outlet for Rick’s barely suppressed lust for mayhem and destruction, all the better.

The stability of their relationship depends totally on mutual revulsion. And when Rick wakes up the next afternoon, he discovers that, blessedly, his revulsion has not waned. But to his horror he finds that his revulsion now encompasses every aspect of Vyvyan and every _possible_ aspect of Vyvyan. He wants to be revolted by all of him. He wants to be revolted by _sex things_ with him. He wants to do revolting sex things with _Vyvyan_.

He heaves a watery trickle of vomit over the side of Vyvyan’s bed, a bed which he resolves never to touch again. The only way to ensure the safety of their bond is to push these perverse sexual instincts -- for they must be nothing more than misplaced instincts -- tight down where they belong. He’ll bottle them up nicely, and that’s that.

He stumbles downstairs and eats cold lentils off the stove -- _directly_ off the stove, where stupid Neil spilled them some few days ago -- until the fog over his vision clears. When he turns around, he sees Vyvyan sprawled on the sofa.

“Oh, hello, Vyvyan,” Rick says, placing one hand on his hip and another on the tabletop, doing his best to look casual. The position puts him at a very odd angle. When Vyvyan looks up, he hurriedly straightens and wipes his hands on his blazer. “How are you? That is, what are you doing?”

“Do you want something from me,” Vyvyan says, “or are you always this boring? What does it look like I’m doing?” He holds up a needle and thread. “I’m sewing.”

“Ah, a new patch for your vest, is it? What’s it say this time, then? ‘I Stink?’” Rick snorts at his own cutting humor.

It’s at that moment that Rick circles around the sofa, hoping to spot some small reaction to his joke on Vyvyan’s face. But he stumbles back, hitting his head on a length of pipe hanging from the ceiling, when he sees Vyvyan’s chest. His entirely bare chest. He looks away, for the sake of Rick’s modesty, and not because he’s about to piss himself in terror at his first ever sight of breasts.

“What, never seen a pair of knockers before?” Vyvyan taunts. “Bet you haven’t. Virgin.”

“They’re called _breasts_ , Vyvyan, and everybody has them,” Rick says, looking fixedly at Neil’s framed psychedelic drawing of a peaceable Roman ex-centurion, hung crooked on the wall behind Vyvyan’s orange head.

“You don’t,” Vyvyan points out.

“Yes, and neither did Vladimir Lenin,” Rick says, nodding his head sharply in satisfaction. That’ll show him. Made bold by pride, he hazards a gander at Vyvyan’s breasts. They seem a rather strange shape -- not as round as he expected. But admittedly, he has nothing to compare them to. He can’t help but ask, “What do you do with them, most of the time?”

Vyvyan is quiet for a moment, head cocked. Then he says, “Squeeze them, I ‘spose. Sometimes I make them jiggle, like this.” He demonstrates.

Rick is about to clarify that he meant to ask how Vyvyan conceals them under his clothes, that he doesn’t have the slightest interest in whatever perverse self-pleasure Vyvyan engages in on his own time. But suddenly something much more significant is happening, and he shouts, “Vyvyan! Why are you stabbing that needle through your finger?”

Vyvyan looks up. There’s wiry thread dangling from the pad of his forefinger. “Just testing something,” he says, and tugs the needle all the way through. “I need to see how it feels to get stitched up, you know.” He gestures to his chest. “For when I cut these off.”

“You’re going to cut them off _yourself_?”

“‘Course not, are you insane?” Vyvyan says. “Gylyan’s gonna do it. Only we can’t pinch much anaesthetic from the teaching surgery, so I’ve gotta test my pain threshold.”

“Who on earth is Gylyan?” Rick spits, before he remembers the frightening redhead looming over him the night before.

“My study buddy,” Vyvyan says simply. “You’ve met her plenty times, Rick. She thinks you’re very rude. And boring, too.” He tugs hard on the needle, finishing a second stitch that crosses over the first.

Rick struggles with an overwhelming internal conflict, worthy of epic verse, before he inches forward for a closer look. Vyvyan stares at him for a second, then holds up the needle, and casually says, “Want to have a go?”

“I -- what?” Rick says, blinking very fast. There seems to be dust in his eye, and probably in his throat as well, because it’s astonishingly hard to breathe.

“You heard me. God, you’re dense.” Vyvyan waves the needle in Rick’s face. “Do you want to put this needle through my finger?” he says, enunciating every syllable. “I need to see how it feels when someone else does it. For the surgery, you know.”

Rick licks his lips. So long as there’s an entirely practical justification, surely it can’t hurt. There’s nothing perverse about helping out a friend. Certainly nothing remotely sexual. He’d have to be crazy to feel any sexual response to the sight of a needle dangling from the calloused skin just above Vyvyan’s first knuckle, the thought of tugging the thread through himself, the swell and burst of blood from tiny capillaries --

“Oh, get on with it, you coward,” the psychedelic centurion taunts, his Crayola mouth shifting from a rictus grin into a parody of human speech.

“I am _not_ a coward,” Rick says, and before Vyvyan can say _prove it_ , he scrambles over to kneel on the sofa, and takes the needle, and says, “What do I do?”

Vyvyan huffs, and holds out his hand. “Just do it. Or are you scared?”

“No, I’m not _scared_ ,” Rick says, and sticks the needle right through the wrinkle of skin in the elbow of the knuckle. Vyvyan gasps. When Rick pulls the thread taut, he hisses. Rick shudders.

When two more cross-stitches are finished, every welling drop of blood and every incomprehensible gurgle low in Vyvyan’s throat sending an involuntary shiver up Rick’s spine, Vyvyan takes the needle away. Rick pouts, but Vyv says, “I’ve got an idea. Give me your hand.”

Rick hesitates, but Vyvyan makes a gesture usually used to indicate “pay up,” and Rick supposes he owes him something or other, somehow. So he holds out his hand, palm down, wrist bent in a way he hopes looks haughty and disdainful.

Vyvyan grabs hold of Rick’s forefinger and lines it up with his own, and creeping dread overtakes Rick just in time for the needle to pierce through his skin, the thread tugging his finger close against Vyvyan’s. He can feel his pulse pounding very fast against the thread. That shy pulse in his fingers that he only ever feels when he’s pressing a pen too hard to paper, trying to squeeze out a poem.

Four more stitches, in three neat crosses, and Vyvyan looks up, grins, and says, “There. Now you’ll always have to hold my hand.”

Rick has just enough time to squeak “You absolute bastard,” and to feel an awfully gooey feeling expanding in his stomach, before he faints.

When he wakes up in Vyvyan’s bed, the stitches are gone, and his finger is tidily bandaged. He feels hazy disappointment at this, which he refuses to examine. Vyvyan’s black t-shirt is bundled up under his head for a pillow. It smells like him -- septic -- and Rick turns to bury his nose in it. Beyond the wrinkled fabric, he sees Vyvyan himself lying belly-down on the floor, an anatomy text open in front of him.

Rick fails to suppress a silly smile, and turns to the wall before Vyvyan can look over. Before he falls back into the deep sleep of one whose body is in shock from needles where they don’t belong, he resolves to go down the shops tomorrow and lift two maroon handkerchiefs. He’ll wear one in each pocket the next time he takes Vyvyan out. _Likes to cut, likes to bleed._


End file.
